Relative or Absolute URLS The SEO Secure Answer
Site maintenance may well be made easier by using relative URLS and indeed transferring the domain is easier than if you absolute URLS too. Whilst the absolute URL method may take more time in terms of updating links on each page the reasons for its usage are strong.
Google for one may well miss some relative links, but from an seo point of view and security absolute URLs win hands down. Absolute URLS are much more secure when implementing a CMS change and less succeptable to hijacking.
Stick with the complete address, giving an entire path to the file is the way to go when possible.
Damien van Holten 1723 days ago
http://www.reaact.net/blog/It’s probably better to use a variable for the full domain? Easy maintenance, handy when moving to another domain and you have absolute URIs everywhere.
For instance in PHP:
$Domain = “http://www.domain.com/”;
Wildfire Marketing Group 1723 days ago
http://www.wildfiremarketinggroup.comI agree 100% but there is another side benefit of absolute links. When the shady people out there steal your website design/content (as they inevitably will do) they usually lack the attention to detail that someone would have if they had actually developed a first-class website and content in the first place; as a result, they end up leaving your links to your internal pages which then provides more backlinks to your site.
Jay Gilmore (smashingred) 1720 days ago
http://www.smashingred.comI’m no SEO expert but what empirical data do you have that there is an SEO benefit from using domain URLs?
I understand the security point but I can’t see that GoogleBot could miss any linked URL? Have you done or read any articles that show better indexing via absolute urls. I’m not disagreeing but just a careful adopter of such recommendations and would prefer to base changes in my practices on data rather than a hunch.
On the security thing though, I do agree that this is an issue for some sites with lazy bots/scrapers that don’t fix URLs.
I am not 100% on this also but I think that absolute URLs call to DNS even on the local server vs relative paths that call to the webserver directly which could lead to increased lag.
I think content owners will need to weigh the cost benefit.
Great post.
Cheers,
Jay
Thogek 1480 days ago
http://www.thogek.com/As Jay asks, I’m still looking for empirical data to support this claim either way. I have a lot of trouble believing that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other search engines cannot equally resolve a domain-relative link to the correct domain-specific URL — especially when client browsers clearly have had no trouble doing so — or that they would penalize a link for not explicitly including said domain. So… *How* is a fully domain-qualified URL at all beneficial over a domain-relative path, and how have we verified that this is so?
The security concern that Wildfire mentions above has nothing to do with SEO (but more with IP protection), but any idiot with a search-and-replace editor can end-run around that in a few seconds, so that hardly seems a factor here.
Anyone?
steve - refresh digital 1476 days ago
http://www.refreshdigital.co.ukApparently there is a google employee who goes by the name of “googleguy” who has spoken about this on a few SEO forums. His comment was that full paths are better as Googlebot is known to not always resolve local urls.
I think theres nothing in it, but I go with full paths just to be safe.
Im interested if my DNS does get his more because of this.. surely someone must be able to let us know if that is true?
Drupal developer 1443 days ago
http://www.qrios.nlAbout the DNS “lag”, this is nonsense to me. At least for human visitors with today’s browsers/OS’s. All browsers are translating relative URL’s to absolute ones before “making the call” to the webserver anyhow, there’s no other way. If and when the DNS is resolved or cached to the website domain is up to the operating system of the client AFAIK.
Interesting topic though.
Regards,
Kees
Cheap Hotel Prices 1202 days ago
http://www.cheap-hotels-today.comWow cheers for the good advice I will be speeding my page up this week so hope it all goes well!